Applications for Education.
Structure great digital citizenship and cyber security skills is something that everybody must be helping our students do. Showing them little tips like this one to avoid clicking suspicious links is among the ways that we can assist our trainees construct their digital citizenship and cyber security skills.

This post initially appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. It has been used without permission if you see it in other places. Sites that frequently steal my (Richard Byrnes) work include CloudComputin, TodayHeadline, and 711Web.

There is a simple way to rapidly determine whats behind a Bitly URL without actually clicking on the link. The technique is to merely include 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.
You can attempt this trick with a URL that I just recently shortened. Bit.ly/ THWTAPRIL will lead you straight to a copy of the slides that I used 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 presentation URL and see when I created the shortened URL..
Enjoy this short video to see how you can utilize the “+” trick to learn whats hidden behind a Bitly link..

Bitly is a handy URL shortener that Ive utilized for many years. As a registered user I can create custom-made, reduced URLs that people can really spell. I use these whenever I need to share a link to a Canva or Google Slides presentation since the default URLs supplied by those services are incoherent and constantly long..

Bitly is a handy URL shortener that Ive used for many years. There is an easy way to quickly identify whats behind a Bitly URL without actually clicking on the link. When you include the “+” the URL will reroute to Bitly instead of to whatever the initial URL was.