Try using this program to find your school, your home, or someplace else (like the Big Island of Hawaii). One interesting test of your navigational ability is to look for the point on the Equator directly below Chicago (0N latitude, 90W longitude). You'll be surprised where it's located.
You can run a simulation over time, with or without Earth's natural lighting. In the image to the left, you are viewing the Earth from above the North Pole at little before the Vernal Equinox Day.
Google Earth is intuitively obvious: you can zoom in and out, drag the planet like an object in your hand, change your cardinal direction orientation, and when close to the surface, your viewing perspective.
Google offers a terrific program, called Google Earth, that does just that. You can download it here. It works for all three major operating systems.
One of the great joys of studying astronomy in the age of fast computers is looking at the Earth and other planets in simulation from outer space.