Little Lexicon is online!

After many months of design, planning, development, family arguments and late nights, I am proud to present a fully functional Little Lexicon!

Click here to check it out!

Little Lexicon greets the world

Right now, all across the internet routers and servers are updating their cached information regarding Little Lexicon. One region at a time Little Lexicon will begin to greet to world.

In a few hours these changes will have taken effect and the site will be live!

Head over to littlelexicon.com now to see if your area has gone live yet. If not feel free to signup for the newsletter and I will let you know immediately when it does so.

As an added bonus you'll also get a promocode good for one free $5 book upgrade.

Sign up and find out why families shouldn't have language barriers. 

How to login without a password

It probably feels weird to login to a web service without a password. Like leaving the house without wearing pants. That's ok. You look fine without pant. In fact, you look better without them. They were limiting your true self.

Ehem.

Anyways, here is a walk through of how it works, just incase you need some extra help in your pantlessness.

1.

First of all get to the home page at http://littlelexicon.com, and enter your email in the login box. Top right. See the image for a visual.

2. 

After that you will be taken to the token claim page, and an email will be sent off to the address you just entered. The page looks like this.

You will receive an email that looks like this. Either copy the token from the mail into the "Claim your login" form, or simply click the link. It can be handy to type the token if, for instance, you are reading the mail from your mobile, while using the site on a laptop.

3. 

That's it! You're logged in! Now that was't so hard was it? :)

Life after passwords

There has been quite a bit of discussion in the web development universe lately about how to fix the current crappy state of passwords. Even good methods of encryption are not enough to keep hackers from stealing passwords by the thousands from web services. Almost monthly there is some new huge data breach with thousands or millions of user records stolen.

With Little Lexicon I chose to use a no-password security scheme. The main reason is that I think that my target audience, parents, would really appreciate a simplification in their lives. I could have used a Facebook or Twitter login as well, but I'm not so keen on giving those services access to the data in my app. Privacy is a big deal to me.

Think about it. You either have one password for every service you use online (really really insecure), or you have a different one for each and are constantly forgetting them. When you go through the "I forgot my password" process, you are actually doing exactly what a no-password system does from the beginning.

So how does it work?
Basically you login to Little Lexicon by entering your email address in the login box on the home page just like any other website. Except instead of asking you for a password, it sends a secure email to your private email address. In the mail is a token and a link. You can either paste the token into the form on the website, or just click the link.

Once you are logged, in a cookie is created in your browser which lets the site identify you on subsequent visits. The cookie also has an expiration date, which we set to be 30 days after you initially login. After that time has passed you will need to login again. You can also manually logout by clicking a link on the webpage.

And why is it better?
Basically we use your email address, and your being able to access your mail as a proof of identity. It means that the only data we have about you in our database is your email address. Even if someone were to hack into our system and steal our data, they would not be able to access your account because in order to do that they would also need to have access to your personal email.

Some people argue that it is a hassle to need to have your mail open each time you want to login. I buy that as a valid argument. However since you are logged in for a month, this doesn't happen all the time. Also, how often are you not browsing with 10 tabs open, or with your smartphone quick at hand with email push notifications?

All in all I think that it's an interesting shift in a use pattern that we take for granted. Maybe it's just time for that to change.

If you're curious to read more about why passwords are not very secure, here are some articles.

Passwords are Obsolete 

Forget your passwords, please

Let's boycott passwords

Trust without passwords

12 Bilingual Kids blogs that you should know about

I put together this list.ly of my favorite bloggers who write about bringing up bilingual kids. There are some amazing people contributing to the pool of information available. Check them out!
There is so much to learn about when raising bilingual kids.
Bilingual kids blogs you should know about

View more lists from Ryan Cole

5 ways to keep your international family in sync

Photo: joeshlabotnik

The benefits of raising kids in a multicultural household are immeasurable. Having an international lifestyle means your kids are exposed to many cultural stimuli and are able to form a well rounded view of the world.

But what about keeping in touch with family members who live far away? Well the internet has a solution to that. I'm American and I live with my wife and 2 boys in Prague, so there is quite some distance, and 7 time zones between me and my parents in Texas. We call at 7pm Prague time and my parents are having lunch at noon in Dallas.

Here are some tips which have worked well for us.

1. Skype
The old man of video chat. Skype is a free piece of software that lets you make voice and video calls to other users for free. Millions of people use it everyday for keeping in touch with loved ones. A lesser known capability of Skype is to call regular phone lines. You can buy credits which allow you to dial any phone. My family has used this with great effect. I normally just ring my mom's cell phone, and if she's at home she moves to the computer to start a video call. We don't use many of the paid minutes, and we can reach her as if on a normal telephone. Cool! I find the video chat to be super important when you have small kids. It allows your little ones to actually see, and remember who those people are that the only meet 2 or 3 times a year.

2. A kid blog
I'm not the kind of parent who wants to blast my kids entire life into the public sphere of Facebook. I have no idea where things like Facebook will be in 10, 15, 20 years. Once you put something there it's there forever. I'll let my kids decide for themselves how public their lives will be. To this end when our first boy was born at the end of 2011 I decided to create a password protected blog where we could dump photos for family members to follow. It worked great. We used Wordpress with a plugin called Private Wordpress to add a password to the entire blog. We could upload images as we pleased and didn't have to worry about losing control of all the images.

3. Whatsapp
Whatsapp messager is a messaging app for smartphones. It lets you send free text, video, photo and audio messages. It's free for the first year and then $1 a year after that. I'm pretty sure our family would collapse with out it. We typically send between 5 and 10 photos and text messages to my parents in a week. It's so easy to snap a picture of the boys doing funny boy things and send it. Effortless. My mom gets a steady stream of grandbaby images and we don't have to go through the ritual of getting image off a camera, uploading them somewhere, sending a link in an email. The ad-hoc benefit for me is tremendous. The only bad thing to come from Whatsapp was that it completely killed our kid blogs. :) Since we could send images on the fly we had no reason any more to upload them to a blog.

4. Facebook
Facebook is the gorilla that lives in the flat down the hall. Sometimes it seems the entire internet revolves around this single service. For better or worse that's the world today. If you are fine with all your data belonging to and being used by the service, then share away. There is really no easier way to stay connected. If you are a bit more privacy focused though there are some things you can do. For instance, create a private group for you and your family. Facebook will still have all your data, but at least your kids images and updates won't be public to the entire planet.

There are a few very big "gotchas" however with using Facebook as a photo sharing service. Once you upload images they are highly compressed and lose a lot of quality. You also cannot export all your photos in bulk at a decent resolution. You can export them, but the quality is abysmal. Don't use it as the only place to store your families images. A service like Flickr is much more suited to this as you can always retrieve your full resolution images. 

5. Kidpost
If you love using Facebook, but have family members who are not using the service there is a neat little website called Kid Post that will fill the gap. You add a #kidpost hash tag to images you want to share beyond FB and Kid post will email them to people in a list you specify. Neat!

So you ask, how does Little Lexicon fit into this field? My goal is to create an independent platform that lets you create a record of your kids words and to give you the power to share it as you please. More public than Whatsapp, but way less public than Facebook. I want families to connect on a deep level no matter if you live 2 floors down from them, or 7 timezones away. I don't even want a language barrier to be a real issue. More and deeper communication can only make the world a better place.

So what do you think? What tools have you found to be invaluable to keeping your family connected?

Here's an amazing article from brainfacts.org about the pysiological differences in monolingual and bilingual brains.

The Bilingual Brain

As scientists unlock more of the neurological secrets of the bilingual brain, they're learning that speaking more than one language may have cognitive benefits that extend from childhood into old age.

+ Enlarge

Brain scans of bilingual individuals found greater gray-matter density (yellow) in the inferior parietal cortex, an area in the brain’s language-dominant left hemisphere. The density was most pronounced in people who were very proficient in a second language and in those who learned a second language before the age of five.

Mechelli A., et al. Nature. Oct. 14; 431:757 (2004).

Parlez vous francais? Sprechen Sie Deutsches? Hablas español? If so, and you also speak English (or any other language), your brain may have developed some distinct advantages over your monolingual peers. New research into the neurobiology of bilingualism has found that being fluent in two languages, particularly from early childhood, not only enhances a person’s ability to concentrate, but might also protect against the onset of dementia and other age-related cognitive decline. These discoveries are leading to:

• A better understanding of how the brain organizes speech and communication tasks.
• Greater insight into how specific types of brain activity may prevent or delay dementia and other agerelated cognitive problems.
• More targeted and effective therapies for helping bilingual individuals recover their communication skills after a brain injury.

Bilingualism is common in the United States. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 21 percent of Americans speak a language other than English at home. Of those, three-quarters also report that they speak English “well” or “very well” — a strong indication that they are bilingual.
Until fairly recently, parents and educators feared that exposing children to a second language at too early an age might not only delay their language skills but harm their intellectual growth. New research, however, has found that bilingual children reach language milestones (such as first word and first fifty words) at the same age as monolingual children. Nor do they show any evidence of eing “language confused.” Indeed, young infants are able to use rhythmical cues  to keep their two languages distinct, and do so from the first days of life.
In fact, being bilingual may give children an advantage at school. Bilingual preschoolers have been found to be better able than their monolingual peers at focusing on a task while tuning out distractions. A similar enhanced ability to concentrate — a sign of a well-functioning working memory — has been found in bilingual adults, particularly those who became fluent in two languages at an early age. It may be that managing two languages helps the brain sharpen — and retain — its ability to focus while ignoring irrelevant information.
Other research suggests that bilingualism may delay the onset of age-related dementia, includingAlzheimer’s disease, by up to four years. Although scientists don’t know why bilingualism creates this “cognitive reserve,” some theorize that speaking two languages may increase blood and oxygen flow to the brain and keep nerve connections healthy—factors thought to help ward off dementia.
More recently, scientists have discovered that bilingual adults have denser gray matter (brain tissue packed with information-processing nerve cells and fibers), especially in the brain’s left hemisphere, where most language and communication skills are controlled. The effect is strongest in people who learned a second language before the age of five and in those who are most proficient at their second language. This finding suggests that being bilingual from an early age significantly alters the brain’s structure.
Exactly how the brain organizes language in bilingual individuals has been debated for many years. Is each language “stored” in its own area of the brain or in overlapping regions? Thanks to technological advances in brain imaging, scientists have recently discovered that the processing of different languages occurs in much of the same brain tissue. However, when bilinguals are rapidly toggling back and forth between their two languages — that is, in “bilingual mode” — they show significantly more activity in the right hemisphere than monolingual speakers, particularly in a frontal area called the dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex (the source of the bilingual advantages in attention and control). This expanded neural activity is so prominent and predictable on brain scans that it serves as a “neurological signature” for bilingualism.
Finally, neuroscience research is showing promise for evaluating and treating bilingual patients who lose the ability to produce or understand speech after a brain injury. Research is showing that rehabilitation efforts that use both languages, not just one — even a patient’s native language — hold the greatest promise for recovery.

Read the original article here.  

Strategies for raising Bilingual kids

When it comes to the actual mechanics of how to deliver the 2 languages in your family it can be confusing to know what strategy is the right fit. There are several well known and tested models. Here are the two most popular.

One Parent One Language
This model works really well when each parent has a different native language. It's a great fit for multicultural marriages and partnerships. Basically the idea is that each parent only speaks their own language to the child at home. It's important not to swap between the languages. Being firm about this will give a stronger foundation for your child to understand the differences between the languages and will give them the advantange of hearing each spoken over a long period of time.

It can also work when there are more than 2 languages. For instance if I am American and my wife is Czech, but we live in Holland we might do the OPOL thing at home, and then speak Dutch outside the house.

It works best when both parents have at least a basic understanding of both languages to assuage any feelings of left-outness.

The Minority Language Model
This strategy is more specific to your circumstance. If for instance you are both Americans and you live in Prague, then English would be the minority language. The children would get Czech at school and everywhere else in their environment, but at home English would be the dominant language.

There are a few more techniques, but I find these to be the most common and most generally useful.

Remember, keep up the minority language!

Resources from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association

Here are some great bits of information published by ASHA regarding bilingualism in children.

There is a really good overview of topics ranging from common fears expressed by parents, such as "Will learning two languages cause speech or language problems?" and "If my child is having trouble communicating, should we use only one language?" to tips and other helpful resources that you might like to know about. 

These issues and worries are very common and most parents going the bilingual route will at some time or another begin to doubt whether they are doing the right thing or not. Not that this feeling of uncertainty is limited to teaching languages by any means. :) 

Here is part of a list of resources they list.

• Bilingual Language Development (YouTube video)
• Can Special Needs Kids be Bilingual? (YouTube video)
• ¡Colorín Colorado!
• International Reading Association
• Myths About Bilingual Children (YouTube video)
• National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition
• National Association for Bilingual Education
• Talk to your baby in your own language
• Tip Sheet: The Advantages of Being Bilingual

If you find these links handy, be sure to check out all the other great stuff the organization has brought together. 

A growing up in a bilingual world

The organization The Hanen Centre posted some facts and statistics about childhood bilingualism on their site. Some of the numbers are quite surprising! 21% of kids in the US are being raised bilingual. Awesome!

Here's an excerpt of the article with some of the key points presented.

...
Our world is becoming increasingly multilingual. Consider some of the following statistics:
In Canada....

• 11.9 % of the population speaks a language other than English or French at home. In Toronto, 31% of the population speaks a language other than English or French at home.

In the United States....

• 21% of school-age children (between ages 5-17) speak a language other than English at home. This number is projected to increase in the coming years.

Worldwide, it is estimated that....

• there are more second language speakers of English than native speakers.

• there are as many bilingual children as there are monolingual  children.

...

I personally found the stats about school-aged kids in the US surprising, but I suppose I shouldn't. I have been living abroad since 2007, and every time I visit home I am amazed by how much more diverse it it. I'm originally from the DFW area in North Texas.

They go on to present some benefits derived from being bilingual.

...

• Bilingual children are better able to focus their attention on relevant information and ignore distractions. For more information, click here for our article “Are Two Languages Better Than One?”.

• Bilingual individuals have been shown to be more creative and better at planning and solving complex problems than monolinguals.

• The effects of aging on the brain are diminished among bilingual adults.

• In one study, the onset of dementia was delayed by 4 years in bilinguals compared to monolinguals with dementia.

• Bilingual individuals have greater access to people and resources.

• In Canada, employment rates are higher for French/English bilinguals than monolinguals.

• Canadians who speak both official languages have a median income nearly 10% higher than that of those who speak English only, and 40% higher than that of those who speak French only.

 ...

Still need more reasons why you should teach your kids that second language?

Read the original article here.

Getting started with Little Lexicon

Here's how easy it is to get started. In less than 4 mins we can create a book, add some words and share it with some friends. Easy as pie!

View it full screen to see the UI in more detail.