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The Middlebury College French School was part of the 2006 pilot program. The French School has used the French in Action textbook series for a number of years. Middlebury College has a license to make the audio material for this series available for download to their students. The publisher, CPB Annenberg, has even compiled this material into a website that institutions can use on their own servers. Descriptions of each audio track were taken from the website and embedded in the audio files themselves so that this metadata could be used by students to search and browse the material on their iPods. Thus students could access this material from the website and/or from their iPods.
The French School was also interested in using iPods in their graduate French phonetics program. Material from their phonetic paradigm database was reformatted for use on iPods, extracting metadata from this database and embedding it in the individual audio files. Just as with the French in Action material, the phonetics audio resources were available on a website as well as on iPods. This phonetics material was also reformatted in the following ways:
- Extended length of short audio files:
The length of the audio for most items was increased by adding silence to the end of the file so that students would have time to pause the playback - Added repetition to audio files:
Each phonetic audio files was extended by adding repetitions of the vocabulary item separated by silence. This allowed students to hear the item, repeat it, hear is again and repeat again. Each phonetic item was repeated 2x.