Inexpensive Teleprompter

When I first started doing video with kids in 1985, I often wanted some kind of teleprompter like I saw in the TV studios. Instead we used big cue cards which worked but were time consuming to make and added some annoying background noise as the pages were turned. I think it was in the mid-nineties that I was introduced to using HyperStudio as a cheap teleprompter at an educational conference. There was a function in that program that scrolled text. So, then with any computer, we were able to set up a simple teleprompter with text that could be quickly edited and easily controlled.

Jump forward to 2007 when I started teaching in a high school studio. It had specialized teleprompter software that cost close to two hundred dollars to purchase and could only be used on one machine. I looked around for a cheap alternative but didn't find anything that I liked that was simple or cheap. The kids often created word documents with enlarged text that they printed out and carried outside the studio.

I recently read about this teleprompter that runs online from the web and is free, CuePrompter.com. If your computer can connect to the web, it can run a teleprompter. When I tested it out and was running text at the biggest size, I had to work with the line breaks to keep the words from getting cut off. Other than that, it seemed to work fine.

If you give this a try, let me know how it works with students. If you have other inexpensive options, let me know about those too.

[Image: Captured from CuePrompter.com: http://cueprompter.com/]