Teaching hacks: Getting rid of those long links

I find myself having to ask students to look up web pages and online materials in various forms all the time. Often, the links are quite long and not very intuitive. The way to fix that is to use a URL (Uniform Resource Locator, fancy name for web address) to turn, for instance

into

  • goo.gl/1kfvfzqr1

which is undeniably shorter and easier to write down fast. I can also make it into a QR code which can be scanned by the students from a PowerPoint slide and brought up on their smartphones.

There are a number of such URL shorteners – goo.gl, bitly.com, TinyURL, and so on. I use goo.gl, but after a tip from Ragnvald Sannes I have installed it as an extension of my Chrome browser, which means that whenever I want to share a link to many people I go to the page in question, click on the URL shortener in the top line of the browser, and that’s that. (There probably are similar extensions available for your browser of choice, go search.)

Quite a little timesaver…

If you want to read more about URL shorteners, try the Wikipedia article (which also lists some of the technical issues that sometimes crop up, though not much in a teaching context.)