What’s Hidden Behind a Bitly Link?

Applications for Education.
Structure great digital citizenship and cyber safety skills is something that everybody ought to be helping our trainees do. Revealing them little pointers like this one to prevent clicking on suspicious links is among the methods that we can assist our trainees develop their digital citizenship and cyber security skills.

Bitly is an useful URL shortener that Ive used for lots of years. As a registered user I can produce custom-made, shortened URLs that people can actually spell. I use these whenever I require to share a link to a Canva or Google Slides discussion due to the fact that the default URLs provided by those services are always long and incoherent..

This post initially appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. It has actually 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 quickly determine whats behind a Bitly URL without really clicking on the link. The trick is to simply include a “+” to the end of any Bitly URL. When you add the “+” the URL will reroute to Bitly instead of to whatever the original URL was.
You can try this technique with a URL that I just recently reduced. Bit.ly/ THWTAPRIL will lead you straight 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 initial presentation URL and see when I produced the reduced URL..
See this brief video to see how you can utilize the “+” trick to learn whats hidden behind a Bitly link..

Bitly is an useful URL shortener that Ive used for lots of years. There is a simple way to rapidly identify whats behind a Bitly URL without actually clicking on the link. When you add the “+” the URL will reroute to Bitly instead of to whatever the original URL was.

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