Applications for Education.
Building excellent digital citizenship and cyber security abilities is something that everybody must be helping our students do. Showing them little pointers like this one to avoid clicking on suspicious links is one of the manner ins which we can assist our trainees build their digital citizenship and cyber safety skills.

Bitly is a helpful URL shortener that Ive utilized for lots of years. There is a simple way to quickly identify whats behind a Bitly URL without really clicking on the link. When you include the “+” the URL will redirect to Bitly instead of to whatever the original URL was.

Sadly, not all Bitly users are utilizing them for excellent factors. Some people utilize them to conceal dubious links. Fortunately, there is a simple method to rapidly identify whats behind a Bitly URL without really clicking on the link. The trick is to merely include a “+” to the end of any Bitly URL. When you add the “+” the URL will redirect to Bitly instead of to whatever the original URL was. That will then reveal you the Bitly page on which the shortened URL is hosted and will reveal you what the original link was..
You can attempt this trick with a URL that I just recently reduced. Bit.ly/ THWTAPRIL will lead you straight 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 initial presentation URL and see when I created the shortened URL..
Watch this brief video to see how you can utilize the “+” trick to find out whats hidden behind a Bitly link..

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

Bitly is a handy URL shortener that Ive used for numerous years. As a signed up user I can produce custom, reduced URLs that people can really spell. I use these whenever I need to share a link to a Canva or Google Slides presentation due to the fact that the default URLs supplied by those services are always long and incoherent..