Applications for Education.
Building good digital citizenship and cyber security skills is something that everybody must be helping our students do. Showing them little suggestions like this one to prevent clicking on suspicious links is one of the methods that we can help our students construct their digital citizenship and cyber safety skills.

Bitly is a helpful URL shortener that Ive utilized for lots of years. There is an easy method to quickly identify whats behind a Bitly URL without actually clicking on the link. The trick 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 original URL was.

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

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, 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.

This post initially appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. If you see it in other places, it has been used without approval.

There is a simple way to rapidly identify whats behind a Bitly URL without actually clicking on the link. The trick is to merely add a “+” to the end of any Bitly URL. When you add the “+” the URL will reroute to Bitly rather of to whatever the original URL was.
You can try this technique with a URL that I recently shortened. Bit.ly/ THWTAPRIL will lead you straight to a copy of the slides that I utilized in my recent Intro to Teaching History With Technology webinar. Bit.ly/ THWTAPRIL+ will lead you to the Bitly page where you can see my original discussion URL and see when I developed the reduced URL..
Enjoy this short video to see how you can use the “+” trick to learn whats hidden behind a Bitly link..

Bitly is a convenient URL shortener that Ive utilized for several years. As a registered user I can produce custom, shortened URLs that people can actually spell. I utilize these whenever I require to share a link to a Canva or Google Slides presentation because the default URLs provided by those services are incoherent and always long..

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