What’s Hidden Behind a Bitly Link?

Applications for Education.
Building great digital citizenship and cyber safety abilities is something that all of us need to be helping our students do. Revealing them little tips like this one to prevent clicking on suspicious links is one of the manner ins which we can help our trainees build their digital citizenship and cyber security abilities.

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

There is an easy method to rapidly determine whats behind a Bitly URL without really clicking on the link. The technique is to just add a “+” to the end of any Bitly URL. When you include the “+” the URL will redirect to Bitly rather of to whatever the initial URL was.
You can try this trick with a URL that I recently shortened. Bit.ly/ THWTAPRIL will lead you straight to a copy of the slides that I used 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 discussion URL and see when I created the reduced URL..
Watch this short video to see how you can use the “+” trick to learn whats concealed behind a Bitly link..

Bitly is a convenient URL shortener that Ive used for lots of years. As a signed up user I can create customized, shortened URLs that people can actually spell. I use these whenever I need to share a link to a Canva or Google Slides discussion since the default URLs provided by those services are incoherent and constantly long..

Bitly is a helpful URL shortener that Ive used for many years. There is a simple method to rapidly determine 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 original URL was.

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