As I do every year, Im taking today as a break from releasing brand-new article and will be republishing some of the most popular posts of the year. Heres one from April.

Heres a video summary of how to see whats behind a TinyURL without really clicking on the link.

If you desire to attempt this with a TinyURL, tinyurl.com/emkns9a8 will lead you to the page for the Practical Ed Tech Virtual Summer Camp, however including a “+” at the end of that TinyURL will take you to the page where you can see the original link without clicking it.

Applications for Education.
Structure good digital citizenship and cyber safety skills is something that everybody should be assisting our students do. Revealing them little ideas like this one to avoid clicking on suspicious links is among the methods that we can assist our students construct their digital citizenship and cyber security abilities.

There is an easy method to rapidly determine whats behind a Bitly URL without actually clicking on the link. The trick is to simply include a “+” to the end of any Bitly URL. When you add the “+” the URL will reroute to Bitly instead of to whatever the original URL was.
You can attempt this trick with a URL that I just recently shortened. Bit.ly/ THWTAPRIL will lead you directly to a copy of the slides that I used in my current Intro to Teaching History With Technology webinar. Bit.ly/ THWTAPRIL+ will lead you to the Bitly page where you can see my initial presentation URL and see when I developed the reduced URL..
View this short video to see how you can use the “+” technique to learn whats hidden behind a Bitly link..

This post initially appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. It has been used without permission if you see it somewhere else.

Bitly is a handy URL shortener that Ive utilized for many years. There is a simple method to rapidly determine whats behind a Bitly URL without really clicking on the link. The technique is to just add a “+” to the end of any Bitly URL. When you add the “+” the URL will redirect to Bitly instead of to whatever the initial URL was.

Bitly is a helpful URL shortener that Ive used for several years. As a registered user I can develop custom-made, reduced URLs that people can really spell. I use these whenever I need to share a link to a Canva or Google Slides discussion since the default URLs provided by those services are always long and incoherent..