What’s Hidden Behind a Bitly Link?

Bitly is a helpful URL shortener that Ive used for several years. As a registered user I can develop custom, reduced URLs that individuals can in fact spell. I use these whenever I need to share a link to a Canva or Google Slides discussion because the default URLs offered by those services are constantly long and incoherent..

Applications for Education.
Building good digital citizenship and cyber security abilities is something that all of us need to be assisting our trainees do. Showing them little pointers like this one to prevent clicking on suspicious links is one of the manner ins which we can assist our students develop their digital citizenship and cyber security skills.

There is a simple way to quickly determine whats behind a Bitly URL without actually clicking on the link. The technique is to just add a “+” to the end of any Bitly URL. When you add the “+” the URL will redirect to Bitly instead of to whatever the initial URL was.
You can try this trick with a URL that I just recently shortened. Bit.ly/ THWTAPRIL will lead you directly to a copy of the slides that I utilized my current 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 developed the reduced URL..
See this short video to see how you can utilize the “+” trick to learn whats hidden behind a Bitly link..

This post initially appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. It has been used without approval if you see it somewhere else. Sites that routinely take my (Richard Byrnes) work include CloudComputin, TodayHeadline, and 711Web.

Bitly is a convenient URL shortener that Ive used for numerous years. There is an easy way to rapidly determine whats behind a Bitly URL without really clicking on the link. When you include the “+” the URL will redirect to Bitly rather of to whatever the initial URL was.

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