What’s Hidden Behind a Bitly Link?

Applications for Education.
Structure great digital citizenship and cyber security skills is something that all of us should be helping our students do. Showing them little ideas like this one to avoid clicking on suspicious links is among the methods that we can assist our trainees construct their digital citizenship and cyber safety skills.

Not all Bitly users are using them for excellent reasons. Some people use them to conceal wicked links. Fortunately, there is an easy way 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 reroute 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 attempt this technique with a URL that I just recently shortened. Bit.ly/ THWTAPRIL will lead you directly to a copy of the slides that I utilized in 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 produced the shortened URL..
View this short video to see how you can utilize the “+” technique to find out whats hidden behind a Bitly link..

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

Bitly is a handy URL shortener that Ive utilized for several years. As a registered user I can produce customized, shortened URLs that people can actually spell. I use these whenever I require to share a link to a Canva or Google Slides discussion due to the fact that the default URLs offered by those services are incoherent and always long..

Bitly is a helpful URL shortener that Ive utilized for lots of years. There is a simple way to rapidly determine whats behind a Bitly URL without really clicking on the link. When you include the “+” the URL will redirect to Bitly instead of to whatever the initial URL was.

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