Applications for Education.
Building good digital citizenship and cyber safety abilities is something that everyone need to be helping our trainees do. Revealing them little ideas like this one to avoid clicking suspicious links is one of the ways that we can assist our students build their digital citizenship and cyber security skills.

Bitly is an useful URL shortener that Ive utilized for many years. As a signed up user I can develop custom, shortened URLs that people can really spell. I use these whenever I need to share a link to a Canva or Google Slides discussion since the default URLs offered by those services are constantly long and incoherent..

There is an easy method to rapidly determine whats behind a Bitly URL without really clicking on the link. The trick is to simply add a “+” to the end of any Bitly URL. When you include 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 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 initial discussion URL and see when I developed the shortened URL..
Watch this short video to see how you can utilize the “+” technique to learn whats hidden behind a Bitly link..

This post initially appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. It has been utilized without consent if you see it elsewhere. Sites that regularly steal my (Richard Byrnes) work include CloudComputin, TodayHeadline, and 711Web.

Bitly is a convenient URL shortener that Ive utilized for lots of years. There is a simple way to quickly determine whats behind a Bitly URL without in fact clicking on the link. When you add the “+” the URL will redirect to Bitly rather of to whatever the original URL was.