I have been looking for a compact, reasonably priced, easy set up teleprompter option for both my Toastmasters Zoom meetings and for YouTube videos. Everything I had found was big, bulky, involved tripods and cameras and was just not what I was looking for. I wanted something that I could clip onto my computer screen. Well, Ladies and Gentlemen, I have found it. Remarkably, it was in my pocket all the time! Yes, that is correct, if you use an iPad or an iPhone, you can use the Pages app on your device as a teleprompter, you can even set it to auto scroll at a speed that suits you, should you wish too. I was delighted when I discovered this feature of Pages. It means I now have the solution I wanted, and should I want to, I can bring it on location with me to make videos, as I can just pop my phone onto a cold shoe mount on top of my camera. Brilliant!
This is how you set up Pages as a teleprompter.
1. Open the document you want to use
2. Tap the three dots in the top right hand corner
3. On the next screen press ‘Presenter Mode’
Under ‘Presenter Mode’ you can change the size of the font, background colour and text options, as well as the speed of the text.
4. In ‘Presenter Mode’, if you tap the Aa button (top right), you can adjust the text size by tapping the small and large A’s on the top.
5. In ‘Presenter Mode’, if you tap the the coloured circles, you can change the colour of the background, this will also change the colour of the text. I have left mine with a black background and white text. You can also change the Font here, should you wish too, as well as formatting options.
6. To set up auto scrolling, again, go into ‘Presenter Mode’, tap the Aa button and then hit ‘auto scroll’, the slider will go orange, so you know it is engaged. Below this you will see a line with a turtle on the left hand side and a hare on the right, if you move the slider towards the hare, the scrolling will speed up and equally, if you push the slider towards the turtle, scrolling slows down. If you want to pause scrolling, just tap the screen.
I think this feature in Pages will vastly improve my online presentations. Have you tried it, and if you have, how have you found it?
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