21st Century Technologies At Rittners Floral School
At Rittners live demonstrations of floral art, and hands-on student practice have always been a mainstay of our programs. However, we have always believed that the latest educational technologies should be used to support the teaching mission of our school. In fact from the establishment of our school to the present day we have always used cutting edge educational technologies in our teaching. (If you are curious about technologies used in the past at Rittners Floral School click here. )
Multiple monitors, digital photography and video production facilities are fully integrated into our school.
Our staff draws from a vast collection of over 175,000 photographs produced in house to illustrate lectures in  our Day Course and for our various web and epublication efforts. Our video and still image holdings allow us to present diverse forms of information with as much impact and clarity as possible. The school owns a variety of cameras in various formats incorporating the latest digital imaging technologies.
An ambitious multi-year project to convert and digitize our media assets has been underway for some time now, and will allow better access, cataloging and preservation.
Today's Rittners Floral School features state of the art computer hardware and software fully integrated into our physical facility. High speed internet access is available in all of our classrooms, and to all of our students. Terminals running up to date robust operating system (Unix based Mac OS X) are in place.
Computers are integrated into our teaching and for presentation of information in efficient and entertaining ways. Hundreds of gigabytes of floral related still and video digital images and information is maintained in our file server and utilized in our presentations. A network wide high speed back up system is in place to protect our digital assets. Our storage capacity now runs a huge number of terabytes.
The implications are definitely nice for an increasingly technologically sophisticated student body. Six Month Day Students find that we have the capacity to accept assignments in more traditional formats, or by powerpoint, word or pdf documents on cds or via flash media.
Students coming from a distance have easy access to email and the internet via our very fast and free wireless internet system. This means that our students can use their own laptops or tablets anywhere in our facility along with our wifi to easily access online resources.
While this sounds like rather complex technical jargon, you, the student need not be nervous about your own technology background or knowledge. All of our technology works quietly in the background supporting our educational mission. (Well......Most of the time it works!)
Ours is definitely a floral school, not a computer school. You need not be knowlegeable about media, or concerned with technology at all, and still enjoy the benefits of ours.
Our program is still very much a hands-on workshop program using generous amounts of flowers, containers, materials and supplies. And our approach is personal as it always has been, stressing live presentations and student/teacher interactions.
All too often places that call themselves floral schools have pretty displays of flowers but very little library support or educational technology infrastructure. We mention all of this technology stuff, only because we have found that prospective students are often interested in the kind of infrastructure that we maintain at Rittners Floral School.
We believe that in the 21st century, to be really effective in its teaching mission, a floral school should have more than just a pretty display of flowers, and design benches.
We are proud that we continue to apply cutting edge educational approaches to teaching floral art and that we are constantly investing in our infrastructure for your benefit!
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