What’s Hidden Behind a Bitly Link?

Applications for Education.
Building excellent digital citizenship and cyber security skills is something that all of us must be helping our students do. Revealing them little tips like this one to prevent clicking suspicious links is one of the methods that we can assist our students construct their digital citizenship and cyber safety skills.

This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. If you see it somewhere else, it has actually been used without approval. Websites that regularly take my (Richard Byrnes) work include CloudComputin, TodayHeadline, and 711Web.

Regrettably, not all Bitly users are using them for good reasons. Some people utilize them to conceal wicked links. There is an easy method to rapidly determine whats behind a Bitly URL without really clicking on the link. The trick is to merely add a “+” to the end of any Bitly URL. When you include the “+” the URL will reroute to Bitly instead of to whatever the initial URL was. That will then show you the Bitly page on which the reduced URL is hosted and will show you what the initial link was..
You can try this technique with a URL that I recently reduced. Bit.ly/ THWTAPRIL will lead you straight to a copy of the slides that I utilized 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 use the “+” trick to learn whats concealed behind a Bitly link..

Bitly is a helpful URL shortener that Ive used for many years. As a signed up user I can produce custom-made, reduced URLs that individuals can actually spell. I utilize these whenever I require to share a link to a Canva or Google Slides discussion since the default URLs provided by those services are incoherent and always long..

Bitly is a convenient URL shortener that Ive used for lots of years. There is an easy method to quickly identify whats behind a Bitly URL without in fact clicking on the link. When you include the “+” the URL will reroute to Bitly instead of to whatever the original URL was.

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