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

This post initially appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. It has actually been used without approval if you see it in other places. Websites that routinely take my (Richard Byrnes) work consist of CloudComputin, TodayHeadline, and 711Web.

Bitly is an useful URL shortener that Ive used for several years. As a registered user I can develop custom, shortened URLs that people can in fact 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 constantly long..

Bitly is a handy URL shortener that Ive used for lots of years. There is an easy way to quickly determine whats behind a Bitly URL without actually clicking on the link. When you add the “+” the URL will redirect to Bitly rather of to whatever the initial URL was.

Not all Bitly users are using them for excellent reasons. Some people use them to conceal nefarious links. There is an easy way to rapidly identify whats behind a Bitly URL without really clicking on the link. The technique 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 shortened URL is hosted and will show you what the original link was..
You can try this trick 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 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 created the shortened URL..
Enjoy this short video to see how you can utilize the “+” trick to find out whats concealed behind a Bitly link..