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

Applications for Education.
Building good digital citizenship and cyber safety skills is something that all of us ought to be assisting our students do. Revealing them little tips like this one to avoid clicking on suspicious links is among the ways that we can help our students develop their digital citizenship and cyber security skills.

There is an easy method to rapidly determine whats behind a Bitly URL without actually clicking on the link. The technique is to just include 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 technique with a URL that I 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 initial discussion URL and see when I created the shortened URL..
View this short video to see how you can use the “+” trick to discover out whats hidden behind a Bitly link..

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

Bitly is an useful URL shortener that Ive used for several years. As a signed up user I can create custom, shortened URLs that people can actually spell. I use 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..