Thursday, July 2, 2015

Use URL Shorteners to Tweet

As you develop your Personal/Professional Learning Network (PLN), you will be using Twitter.
There are many powerful professional conversations are happening there every day.

When using Twitter, you will notice that many professional tweets include a web resource in the form of a URL. However, when tweeting, we are limited to 140 characters.

That means that if I want to share my classroom website, it eats into my 140-characters to tweet the full-length URL: https://sites.google.com/site/misterwarkentin/
That's 46 characters! 

"There's gotta be a better way!" you might think. "Some URLs that I might want to share are way longer than that. And then if I want to actually SAY anything in my tweet, I can't afford a long URL!"

Using URL shorteners are just the thing for this problem. You can use them with a free account, and the URLs that you shorten will be saved, so you can look them up again, if you ever want to use them again. Or, you can use them without a login.

My two favorite examples are:

I used https://bitly.com/ to reduce my class website's URL to: http://bit.ly/senorw
That's only 20 characters - less than half of its former self!
(and a whole lot easier to share with someone, even outside of Twitter)

I used https://goo.gl/ to reduce my class website's URL to: https://goo.gl/YeoYF6
That's only 21 characters - also a significant diet!

One other advantage of https://goo.gl/ is that you can easily make QR codes with one more quick step:
Click Details, right next to your long URL on your the https://goo.gl/ page.













You'll then see a QR code image on the resulting web page.


Copy that image to your desktop, and you can paste it into whatever document you need it for!




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