Newspaper Navigator - A New Search Tool from the Library of Congress

This week the Library of Congress launched a new search tool called Newspaper Navigator. Newspaper Navigator is an index of 1.5 million images published in newspapers between 1900 and 1963. You can search Newspaper Navigator by keyword and then narrow your results by date and or the U.S. state in which the newspaper was published. There is a highly detailed tutorial on how to use the LOC's Newspaper Navigator right on its search page.

I gave the Newspaper Navigator a try this afternoon. It's easy to use, but I was a little disappointed in the results. It appears that the results are based on the tags associated with the images in the newspapers as opposed to the words on the pages themselves. For example, I attempted to find items from Maine newspapers related to the Clean Water Act. Not only did that search not yield any results a broader search without the specification of a state didn't yield any results. Likewise, a search for "moose" didn't yield any results.

Applications for Education
The LOC's Newspaper Navigator could be useful if you or your students are conducting a general interest search for historical photographs from newspapers. But if you're searching for something specific about a topic from a historical newspaper, you'll be better served by using the Google Newspaper Archives. Here's a video about how to search the Google Newspaper Archive.

Blurred Backgrounds and Custom Grids in Google Meet

Yesterday, I shared news about a new teacher control in Google Meet. Today, there are two more new Google Meet features to note.

The latest announcements from Google about Meet carried the news that you're now able to customize the grid view in your meetings and you can now blur your background in Meet. Both of these features started to roll-out this week and should be available to all G Suite for Education users by the end of the month.

Blurring backgrounds during a Google Meet provides the benefit of removing potential distractions from your background as well as preserving privacy when you're in a place where you might not be alone. Initially, blurring backgrounds in Google Meet will only be available in Chrome on a Mac or Windows computer. Blurring backgrounds in Google Meet on Chromebooks and phones will be available at a later time that Google has not yet announced.

Customizing the grid view in Google Meet will let you specify how many tiles you want to see at one time in a meeting. You'll now be able to have up to 49 tiles displayed at a time. If you're not sure how to access the grid view in Google Meet, watch this short video.


It's important to note that Google has said that using third-party extensions to customize Google Meet may cause the new native features (grid and background views) to not work correctly or at all.