Google just released a product called Google Art Project that every art teacher (and even history teachers) should love. Using its Street View technology that is featured on Google Maps, members of the Google team produced 360-degree images of galleries in some of the world’s most famous museums. Current institutions included in the new site are The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery in London, the Palace of Versailles in France, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and many more.

The killer feature of Google Art Project is not the ability to just “walk” through a gallery; it is that users can click on individual works of art to see them in high-resolution. You can then zoom in to the work and see detail that you wouldn’t be able see if you were actually in the museum.

Many museums have already posted some of their works on their own websites. But with Google’s technology, the art comes alive in your web broswer.

A side note: this project was conceived and designed by Google employees as part of their 20% program. Google allows its staff to spend 20% of their work time on projects that interest them, even if they are outside of their normal work assignments. What if we let students spend 20% of their time learning about and working on projects that they are passionate about?