Applications for EducationAs I wrote recently, building great digital citizenship and cyber safety abilities is something that everybody need to be helping our students do. Showing them little pointers like this one to avoid clicking suspicious links is one of the methods that we can assist our trainees build their digital citizenship and cyber security skills.

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

The trick is to add “+” to the end of the Bitly URL to see whats behind it without clicking on it. A couple of people emailed me to ask if the that worked with other URL shortening services. If you see it somewhere else, it has been used without consent.

Recently I wrote
The technique is to add “+” to the end of the Bitly URL to see whats behind it without clicking on it. A few individuals emailed me to ask if the that worked with other URL reducing services.
TinyURLs..

Ive attempted the “+” trick with a lot of other URL reducing tools and TinyURL is the just one besides Bitly that Ive discovered it to work with..
Whats the trick?

The technique is to add a “+” to the end of any TinyURL address in order to arrive at a safe TinyURL page that exposes what the initial link was that got shortened. If you want to click through to the location or not, you can then choose.
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 adding a “+” at the end of that TinyURL will take you to the page where you can see the original link without clicking it.

This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. It has been used without approval if you see it in other places. Sites that routinely take my (Richard Byrnes) work consist of CloudComputin, TodayHeadline, and 711Web.