Skip to main content

Learning from world class athletes across the globe



In NCEA PE 1.2 (shoot hoops) the students have to learn about the short and long term physiological responses to exercise.  In class discussion one morning we were talking about some of the long term changes and we started to talk about sport specific changes in your body.  I mentioned how some big wave surfers train by expanding lung capacity, and do it to an extreme level so they have to have resuscitation gear by the side of the training pool and could easily lead to someone being in a sticky
situation.  The boys were fascinated by this, mainly because it involved the potential of someone being seriously close to death!!  I decided to run with it and put some clips up on the board of big wave surfing and other sports where you had to adapt your body through training to improve performance and safety.  The clip below came up showing +Andrew Cotton on his 2012 Billabong XXL nomination in Ireland, the boys were astounded and had never seen a wave that big.  At the end of the clip most of the boys thought he was actually dead (?!) so I suggested that we contacted him on twitter to find out if a) he was still alive and b) what type of training does he do to allow his body to take such punishment!



Andrew was happy to answer any of our questions, we used a collaborative google document to put together the questions and when the boys had worked out what they wanted to ask him I shared the document with him and he sent back the responses via his phone on the beach in Croyde, Devon, his personal trainer @bayfitness joined him at the start and attempted a bit of the local lingo!


The boys were thrilled to see Andrew answering the questions and his comments sparked more conversations about the responses to exercise.  It was an interesting learning task and the boys were captivated by the responses - they decided to thank Andrew in the video below.



*school haka to follow - blogger has some video upload issues at the moment!*

I'd like to thank Andrew again for his time and the effort he put into making a video to answer our questions - all the best for you big wave surfing career.  Here are the links to Andrews sites;

http://andrewcottonsurfer.blogspot.com/
https://twitter.com/andrew_cotton

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How to collaborate with ChatGPT in the research process and actually learn something

If you have used chatGPT before, it can sometimes feel like talking with someone who has done too much of their 'research on Facebook', filling in gaps with random facts marginally related to the topic just so they can respond and keep the conversation going. However, if applied or 'prompted' correctly, with the user utterly aware of the limitations and ethical considerations, chatGPT can be a helpful research assistant. There is already a wide range of tools available that are built on chatGPT that can support many of the things described below; however, I am still a bit hesitant to rush in with most of them being 'freemium' or asking you to upload your own research and other details or data into their database, I'm happy to stick with the open version of chatGPT as it is what our students have access to. Image created with AI The following guide highlights some prompts, some follow-up questions and most importantly, what you need to do next to follow up a...

Group email parents with Kamar and Gmail

After # EdChatNZ on Thursday night I was really determined to make digital contact with parents and share with them the great work their sons were doing!  At our school we use Kamar to collect absences, store student data and report back to parents.  It has a handy function where you can click on a student and email the parents directly, but I wanted to email all the parents of classes at once.  After a bit of playing around I managed to find a way to do it, here's what I did!!! 1) In Kamar select 'Printing' then select 'Export'  This will save the file so you can copy the addresses into gmail, rather than printing it out. 2) Now you need to select your class - as I wanted to email one class at a time I need to select a single class, but you have to option to select multiple groups.  Click on 'Option Subject' and then type your teacher code into the box.  Your classes should all appear and then when you select the class it will copy into the b...

Motivation and homework follow up...

Last week I wrote about setting a homework challenge to learn muscles of the body as an online game - the students then had to post screen grabs on google+ to show they had done it and to be in contention for the hallowed prize of 'King of the Muscles' and a cafe voucher. I wasn't quite sure how it was going to go, but by Thursday the buzz in all my senior classes was about ' poke-a-muscle '.  The boys were so excited about it they'd post a score, and then find out that someone had beaten them, and then rush out of the class at interval to get to a computer and beat the top score.  I even had an email on Saturday (two days after the due date) from two boys who had been practicing and spent the afternoon working together to try and beat the original high scores they had submitted with the homework!!!