Technology 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.

Back in the mid forties when our school was first established our school pioneered in the use of photography as an adjunct to our lectures. Motion pictures were leased and a movie projector was purchased. The projector was legendary in the annals of our school in that it practically required an engineering degree to thread. In those days our school also pioneered recording students' voices (another cutting edge technology in those days!) to help them in sales situations. We don't use the projector or recorder anymore, but we still use the same traditional school bell!

Fast forward to the 21st Century.

We continue to integrate cutting edge educational technologies creatively into our programs.

Multiple monitors and video production facilities are fully integrated into our school. A vast collection of approximately ten thouand slides are routinely used to illustrate lectures in our day course. Our video and slide capacity 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 as well as newer digital devices. 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. Along with more traditional slide presentation equipment, hundreds of gigabytes of floral related digital images and information is maintained in our fileserver and utilized in our presentations. A network wide high speed back up system is in place to protect our digital assets.

The implications are definitely nice for an increasingly technologically sophisticated student body. Students coming from a distance have easy access to email, or may plug their own laptops into our network. Six Month Day Students find that we have the capacity to accept assignments in more traditional formats, or by powerpoint, word or pdf documents burned onto cds.

We have also introduced free wireless internet access into our school. This means that our students can use their own laptops anywhere in our facility 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.

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.

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!