I am not a fan of blocking or filtering, but I think the removal of Sound Cloud from the EDU version is for the best, for now.
IF this has made you unhappy, Sound Cloud is still available at www.buncee.com
Barbara Johnson
Library Media Specialist
Jack Jackter Intermediate School
@technojohnson
CT Digital Library Advisory Board
CASL Board of Directors
CECA Board of Directors
EBSCO School Library Advisory Board
#MakerMeetup2016 Organizer
PBS Learning Media Digital Innovator
From: Marie Clarke - Arturi [mailto:marie@buncee.com]
Sent: Thursday, April 7, 2016 11:33 AM
To: bajohnson@colchesterct.org
Cc: Bryan Gorman <bryan@buncee.com>
Subject: Soundcloud has been removed & buncee search
Barbara -
This is Marie, the CEO of eduBuncee. Bryan mentioned your concerns to me and please allow me to sincerely apologize on behalf of the entire buncee team for your challenges. Filtering search has been a priority of ours and as Bryan mentioned - we use filtered search for the web media in conjunction with our own in-house developed filters on top of that. When we first added Soundcloud, years ago, the comments weren’t what they are today. We have discussed removing Soundcloud a number of times as we continued to add more inappropriate words to our filter. Sadly, we did not think of ‘Bill Clinton'.
As you see from the graphic below - your issue prompted us to finally remove Soundcloud from eduBuncee.
We have put an enormous amount of time and energy into COPPA compliance and are beginning conversations with iKeepSafe, which is a crawler that validates what companies say they do - they actually do We just pulled Bing search for images because even though we pulled the link with the image - giving attribution to the site where it was found - we couldn’t always be sure it was a Creative Commons image. We changed our search to Pixabay, which provides only Creative Commons images.
It is our firm commitment to continue to evaluate what is appropriate as technology evolves. We do use the filters for Youtube and Vimeo … but can’t be 100% certain of results there as well. We filter buncee but
cannot, obviously, filter the other sites. These concerns also prompted us to build out our School-wide version so that an administrator has controls to turn off any media for a school or grade, with granularity down to the individual student.
Every school is very, very different in how they approach what they offer students - I am sure we will get questions today about Soundcloud being removed, but I too share your concerns.
That being said ~ thank you very much for communicating your concerns. Feedback will always make us a better company.
My very best ~
Marie
Marie Arturi • Chief Executive Officer • Buncee LLC
631.591.1390 (office) • 631.830.3033 (mobile) • 631.591.1389 (fax)