Best of 2021 – See What’s Behind Bitly and TinyURL Without Clicking

Applications for Education.
Building good digital citizenship and cyber safety skills is something that everyone ought to be assisting our trainees do. Revealing them little ideas like this one to avoid clicking suspicious links is among the ways that we can help our trainees construct their digital citizenship and cyber safety abilities.

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

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.

Not all Bitly users are utilizing them for great factors. Some people use them to hide nefarious links. There is an easy method to rapidly determine 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 include the “+” the URL will reroute to Bitly rather 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 technique with a URL that I recently shortened. Bit.ly/ THWTAPRIL will lead you directly to a copy of the slides that I utilized 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 developed the shortened URL..
See this brief video to see how you can utilize the “+” trick to discover whats hidden behind a Bitly link..

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

Bitly is a convenient URL shortener that Ive used for many years. There is an easy way to rapidly identify whats behind a Bitly URL without really clicking on the link. The trick 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 initial URL was.

This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. It has been used without permission if you see it elsewhere.

Bitly is a helpful URL shortener that Ive utilized for numerous years. As a signed up user I can produce customized, shortened URLs that individuals can in fact spell. I use these whenever I require to share a link to a Canva or Google Slides presentation because the default URLs offered by those services are constantly long and incoherent..

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