A Checklist iPad at Every Media Station: How We Set It Up

Uncategorized Aug 17, 2026

Every week our band walks up on stage with an iPad in front of them. Chord charts, so nobody loses their place in the middle of a song.

Our media team had nothing like that, and I never thought about it until this year. When the band loses their place, everyone hears it. When the media team loses their place, it's quieter. A slide comes in late. A mic doesn't get unmuted fast enough. Nobody's sure whose job it was to do that one thing everybody forgot about.

So I bought four used iPads and put one at every media station: ProPresenter, sound, cameras, and the live stream room. One per station, not one per volunteer.

Why the booth computer isn't enough

Before the iPads, I had already bookmarked our Notion pages as the home tab in Chrome on every booth computer. That helped, but it wasn't enough.

When someone is running ProPresenter, they're not sitting in Chrome. ProPresenter is full screen, and that's where it should be. I didn't want a checklist competing with the thing they came to do.

A separate screen fixes that, because it isn't tied to the machine they're operating.

What's on each iPad

Each iPad has that station's page pulled up in Notion. On it:

The checklist of everything that person is responsible for, start to finish.
How to log into the computer.
What order to turn things on.
The rest of the stuff that never gets written down and usually lives in one person's head.

The ProPresenter iPad has the ProPresenter page. The sound iPad has the sound page. Whoever is serving at that station walks up to a page that's already open.

Where the station pages come from

The pages on our iPads come from the Church Notion System Hub Template. It has a page for every media role: sound, ProPresenter, cameras, live stream, and more. You can copy the whole hub into your own Notion account and pull up the matching page on each station's iPad.

Chord charts for the media team

When I introduced the iPads to the team, I told them to think of it like chord charts, but for the media team. The band has a reference so they don't get lost.

They liked it more than I expected. It turns out people enjoy not having to dig through their texts to find a checklist I sent them earlier.

What kind of iPad you need

These iPads aren't doing much, so they don't have to be expensive. All they do is show a page.

I bought the cheapest iPad that still runs the current iPadOS. For us that was a renewed iPad 9th generation. That's an affiliate link, so I get a small kickback at no extra cost to you. They were used, so a couple of them have scratches and scuffs.

How long it took to set up

This wasn't a big project. I bought the iPads, mounted them, and pulled up a page on each one. It has become one of my favorite additions to our setup this year.

Common questions

Do you need one iPad per volunteer?

No. We have one iPad per station: ProPresenter, sound, cameras, and the live stream room. Whoever serves at that station uses the iPad that's already there.

Why not put the checklist on the booth computer?

We tried that by setting our Notion pages as the Chrome home tab on every booth computer. The problem is that ProPresenter runs full screen, so the checklist ends up competing with the program the volunteer is there to run.

What iPad works for a media station checklist?

Any iPad that still runs the current iPadOS. We bought used, renewed iPad 9th generation models because the cheapest option was all the job needed.

How do you get volunteers to use a checklist?

I introduced it as chord charts for the media team. The band already has a reference so they don't get lost, and the iPad gives the media team the same thing. Our team liked it more than I expected.

What goes on a media station checklist?

Everything that role is responsible for, start to finish, plus the details that usually never get written down, like how to log into the computer and what order to turn things on.

Church Media Training