Today, Google unveiled the Google News Timeline. The Google News Timeline could become a fantastic resource for anyone that teaches current events and or 20th – 21st Century history. The Google News Timeline allows you to search for news stories by event, a person’s name, or by date. In the example below I searched for “John F. Kennedy, 11/22/63.”
Search results include links to stories, images, and videos. In some cases your search will yield results from archived magazines and newspapers. In my testing of the service, I found that searches for more recent events yielded more results than searches for older events.
As a research tool, the best feature of the Google News Timeline is the ease with which you can find related results by dragging the timeline forward or backward with your mouse.
The Google News Timeline is still in development in the Google Lab, but what they’ve made available thus far is a very promising tool for history teachers and students.
Applications for Education
The Google News Timeline could be a very useful research tool for history and current events students. Through the use of the timeline, students will be able to choose an event then read about the lead-up and aftermath of that event. For example, if a student picked “fall of the Berlin wall” they could use the Google News Timeline to read news accounts of the days prior to the fall of the wall and the days following the fall. The timeline will also display links to current writing on the student’s chosen topic.
Here are some related resources that may be of interest to you:
TimeRime Multimedia Timeline Builder
Three Great Timeline Builders
Time Search – Search History on a Timeline
