Applications for Education.
Building great digital citizenship and cyber security abilities is something that all of us need to be assisting our students do. Showing them little pointers like this one to avoid clicking suspicious links is one of the methods that we can help our trainees build their digital citizenship and cyber security abilities.

Bitly is a helpful URL shortener that Ive used for numerous years. As a signed up user I can develop custom, reduced URLs that individuals can really spell. I use these whenever I need to share a link to a Canva or Google Slides discussion due to the fact that the default URLs supplied by those services are incoherent and always long..

Not all Bitly users are utilizing them for great reasons. Some individuals utilize them to hide wicked links. There is an easy method to quickly identify whats behind a Bitly URL without actually clicking on the link. The trick is to merely include a “+” to the end of any Bitly URL. When you include the “+” the URL will redirect to Bitly instead of to whatever the original URL was. That will then show you the Bitly page on which the reduced URL is hosted and will reveal you what the initial link was..
You can try this technique with a URL that I just recently reduced. Bit.ly/ THWTAPRIL will lead you directly 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 initial discussion URL and see when I developed the reduced URL..
View this brief video to see how you can utilize the “+” technique to discover whats hidden behind a Bitly link..

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

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