The Long and Short of It: TinyURL

Teachers and students like using the internet. There are some extremely useful links to frequent and integrate into classroom activities. However, excessively long web addresses are enough to dissuade both educators and pupils from sharing and making it to some very good sites. For example, a teacher in Roswell, New Mexico may chance upon an interactive map of her region. She may be very excited about referring to or otherwise using the map in a lesson. She finds the web address.

The teacher dutifully copies and pastes it into an email to a colleague or an assignment for her second period class. It looks like this when she does:

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=roswell,+nm&ie=UTF8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&ll=33.426284,-104.522552&spn=0.249285,0.42572&z=11&iwloc=addr

Ugh!

Thankfully, the teacher has heard of TinyURL.

She pastes that burdensome link into the textbox at TinyURL.
After clicking on the Make TinyURL button, ta-da, her wooly web address suddenly becomes much more manageable.
The once, maddeningly long web address has been reduced to: http://tinyurl.com/5dreda, an address that is easily shared and accessed.

:-)