If you’ve never taken a look at Bing Maps, now may be the time. We’ve been using GoogleEarth to teach our students about maps and it’s a fantastic tool, but Bing maps has a cool new feature called bird’s eye view which is a little different than satellite view. Instead of showing an area from directly above, bird’s eye view is at an angle so you can get a more realistic view of the buildings. You can see what Tredegar Iron Works looks like from bird’s eye view in the picture at left. It’s great for giving our elementary students a different perspective on important places and learning how maps are created. If you install the optional SilverLight plugin you can also zoom down into 3-D street view! I’ve tried to highlight some of these cool features in this movie.