Educators aren't the only ones taking advantage of the technology. Others also have discovered how to tinker with the search engine's mapping service to graphically illustrate vital information that might otherwise be ignored, overlooked, or not perceived as clearly.

"This is pretty interesting for organizations, such as school districts, that have maps that provide boundary information and such," wrote Tim Lauer, principal of Meriwether Lewis Elementary School in Portland, Ore., and a frequent contributor to eSchool News Online's Ed-Tech Insider, a blog for educators and technology advocates. "Imagine a district map that showed bus stops combined with Google content. Families could punch in their home address and easily find the closest stop."

At the Hopkins Independent School District in Minnesota, technology integration specialist Tim Wilson demonstrated to a group of social studies students how Google Maps can be manipulated to display satellite imagery of their homes, compare geographic regions, and even zoom in on their school building.

"I opened a couple browser tabs and loaded a view of the Twin Cities metro area on one and the Phoenix area on the other," wrote Wilson about the experience. "After switching to the satellite view and doing some zooming in and out, the differences in landforms were obvious, and I think it really made sense for the students. They also really got a kick out of zooming in on a satellite view of their school and finding their homes in the surrounding neighborhoods."

Yahoo and other sites also offer maps, but Google's four-month-old mapping service is more easily accessible and manipulated by outsiders, advocates of the technology say.

As it turns out, Google charts each point on its maps by latitude and longitude--that's how Google can produce driving directions to practically anywhere in the nation.

Not surprisingly, schools aren't the only places considering innovative uses for the technology.

Seasoned developers have figured out how to match these points with locations from outside databases that can contain vast amounts of information--anything from police blotters to real estate listings.

Thanks to Adrian Holovaty, 24, who overlayed Chicago Police Department crime statistics on a Google map, house-hunters in the Albany Park neighborhood can pinpoint all the sexual assaults in the district between May 19 and April 19 on a single map. With each crime marked by a virtual pushpin, Chicagoans can quickly learn which dangerous train stations, pool rooms, and alleys to avoid.

Holovaty hopes to make the maps more current by persuading Chicago police to provide the data directly, rather than forcing him to glean the information from the department's web site.