Applications for Education.
Building excellent digital citizenship and cyber security skills is something that all of us need to be helping our trainees do. Revealing them little pointers like this one to avoid clicking on suspicious links is one of the ways that we can help our trainees construct their digital citizenship and cyber safety skills.

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

This post initially appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. If you see it somewhere else, it has been utilized without authorization.

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

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

Bitly is an useful URL shortener that Ive utilized for lots of years. As a signed up user I can develop custom-made, reduced URLs that individuals can in fact spell. I utilize these whenever I need to share a link to a Canva or Google Slides discussion because the default URLs provided by those services are incoherent and always long..

Not all Bitly users are using them for great factors. Some people use them to hide wicked links. Thankfully, there is a simple method to rapidly determine whats behind a Bitly URL without really clicking on the link. The technique is to simply add a “+” to the end of any Bitly URL. When you include the “+” the URL will redirect to Bitly instead of to whatever the original URL was. That will then show you the Bitly page on which the shortened URL is hosted and will reveal you what the initial link was..
You can attempt this trick with a URL that I just recently reduced. Bit.ly/ THWTAPRIL will lead you straight 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 original presentation URL and see when I created the reduced URL..
View this brief video to see how you can utilize the “+” trick to discover whats concealed behind a Bitly link..

Bitly is a helpful URL shortener that Ive used for many years. There is an easy way to rapidly determine whats behind a Bitly URL without in fact clicking on the link. The technique is to just include a “+” to the end of any Bitly URL. When you add the “+” the URL will redirect to Bitly rather of to whatever the original URL was.