Serendipity35

I have been looking at several tools that are in the Google Labs, which is Google's virtual workshop of projects. Even though these services are "beta," you can use them, and some projects (like Gmail) remain there for years before they actually get officially released.

Today, it is Google News Timeline. I think this is a good way to interest students in (re)search and information literacy, and foster moving them beyond using the regular search engines.

It would be good for an assignment involving students researching modern history. Using News Timeline tool, you can search by day, week, and decade. The results will come up as a timeline with both print and media. It pulls from Time, USA Today, the New York Times, Wikipedia and a variety of other news sources.

It's a good visualization of how stories emerge, timeline style, as they were contemporaneously reported. 

http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com/