If you desire to try 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 original link without clicking it.

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

This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. If you see it elsewhere, it has actually been utilized without approval.

Applications for Education.
Building good digital citizenship and cyber security abilities is something that everyone must be helping our students do. Revealing them little pointers like this one to avoid clicking on suspicious links is among the ways that we can assist our trainees construct their digital citizenship and cyber security skills.

Unfortunately, not all Bitly users are utilizing them for excellent reasons. Some people use them to conceal nefarious links. There is an easy method to quickly determine whats behind a Bitly URL without in fact clicking on the link. The technique is to simply include 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 reduced URL is hosted and will show you what the original link was..
You can try this technique with a URL that I recently reduced. 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 original discussion URL and see when I created the shortened URL..
View this brief video to see how you can use the “+” technique to discover whats hidden behind a Bitly link..

Bitly is a helpful URL shortener that Ive used for many years. There is a simple way to quickly identify whats behind a Bitly URL without really clicking on the link. The technique is to simply include a “+” to the end of any Bitly URL. When you add the “+” the URL will reroute to Bitly rather of to whatever the initial URL was.

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

Bitly is a helpful URL shortener that Ive used for several years. As a signed up user I can develop custom-made, reduced URLs that individuals can in fact spell. I use these whenever I need to share a link to a Canva or Google Slides presentation because the default URLs supplied by those services are incoherent and always long..