Another KUNZ Podcast

The students have just released another edition of their Podcast KUNZ. I cannot help but being deeply impressed with their work, since I didn’t have anything to do with it this time. I guess they are getting a hang of producing a podcast. That’s quite a rewarding experience for me, I must admit. I hope they’ll keep it up, since working on a podcast can be very time consuming.

Anyway, here are their topics for this month:

• a calendar of cultural events in Wolfsburg,
• an interview with exchange students from France,
• and the basketball player of the SG Braunschweig.

KUNZ #3 of March 20th 2007 in mp3 format: KUNZ-03-070320.mp3

If you enjoy the podcast, please vote for them at Podcastalley.com using this Link. I’m sure they’ll appreciate it.

Wengo Wengooooo… once again

After my previous failure to get WengoPhone to cooperate, I had the opportunity to try the Linux release candidate of version 2.1 this weekend.

Well, I must admit, things have improved a lot. Following a brief registration process, which directly compared to Skype seems a little bit too complicated, I got connected to WengoPhone and could place my first call. The sound quality does not quit match that of Skype. And the WengoPhone smilies just look plain awful. But those are things that probably will be improved pretty soon. Also the software crashed several times, but after all it’s just a release candidate.

What I found mildly annoying was the fact that Wengo refused to register a second account from my IP address. How am I supposed to get a class of 30 students to register when I have to get a new IP address for each student?

So what’s better than Skype? Well, for one thing WengoPhone is open source and it uses open standards, whereas Skype is proprietary and owned by a single corporation. Skype is free for now, but who knows what will happen once it gains a large market percentage. So open source is definitely the safer choice.

Also the Linux client of WengoPhone is fully featured, i.e. it includes webcam support as well as conference calls. The Skype version for Linux has been lacking this for ages.

Anyway, I hope the OpenWengo team will keep improving their client and I’m looking forward to using it full time one day.

Presenting ourselves

Yesterday we had the opportunity to present ourselves to parents intending to send their children to our school. Our work with the laptop computers gained a high level of attention all day – much to our satisfaction of course. On the other had it comes as no surprise to see that many people interested in modern classroom methods and media. After all, so far this Linux driven 9th grade class has been a huge success.

Also once again we tried to raise the awareness of our podcast KUNZ.