Applications for Education.
Building good digital citizenship and cyber safety abilities is something that all of us should be assisting our trainees do. Revealing them little suggestions like this one to prevent clicking on suspicious links is one of the ways that we can help 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 create custom, shortened URLs that people can actually spell. I utilize these whenever I need to share a link to a Canva or Google Slides presentation due to the fact that the default URLs offered by those services are constantly long and incoherent..

Bitly is a helpful URL shortener that Ive used for numerous years. There is an easy method to quickly determine whats behind a Bitly URL without in fact clicking on the link. When you include the “+” the URL will redirect to Bitly rather of to whatever the original URL was.

Regrettably, not all Bitly users are utilizing them for great reasons. Some people use them to hide nefarious links. Thankfully, there is a simple way to rapidly identify whats behind a Bitly URL without in fact clicking on the link. The trick is to just include a “+” to the end of any Bitly URL. When you include the “+” the URL will redirect to Bitly rather 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 try this technique with a URL that I just 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 developed the shortened URL..
See this short video to see how you can utilize the “+” trick to learn whats concealed behind a Bitly link..

This post initially appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. It has actually been utilized without permission if you see it somewhere else. Websites that regularly take my (Richard Byrnes) work include CloudComputin, TodayHeadline, and 711Web.