Videoconferencing is one of the greatest technologies to come out of the last twenty years. While the earliest videoconferencing systems were cumbersome and impossible to use in some cases, the newer videoconferencing systems are quite easy to use and they transmit pictures and audio in the best possible quality.

In fact, in many cases, it has truly become like sitting in the same room with another person, making it the perfect substitute for extensive travel between states, countries, and even time zones in some situations. Videoconferencing, though, is not just limited to business applications.

There are a number of different creative uses for videoconferencing that you should consider when you are thinking about this great new technology.

One of the most creative videoconferencing applications occurs in the world of education. With the right equipment, groups of school children can now take field trips without ever leaving the classroom. Students can go places and talk with people that were considered off limits before videoconferencing technology came to light.

For example, classes can talk to experts in a variety of different areas to help them understand a particular subject they are working with. If students are studying rocketry, a quick virtual field trip to NASA to chat with our countrys leading scientists is not off limits even if you happen to have a classroom full of fourth graders living in the state of Washington. This can be a wonderful tool for students and teachers for a number of different reasons.

Studies have shown that contact with experts from the real world truly helps students. It can help to improve their interest in the particular field. If you go back to the NASA example for a moment, talking with the scientist who engineered the Mars ROVER may help to spark a childs imagination where a simple science video could not.

This type of virtual field trip may also help to get a child more motivated in the subject area. For many kids, the careers they dream of seem so far away. With virtual field trips and visits with scientists and other career professionals who may have previously been off-limits, children can get closer to the experience itself, helping them to realize that their careers are not a thing of the future, they are something they can be working toward today.

One final way these virtual field trips can help is that they can increase retention levels of students studying the subject. After all, it is much more fun and exciting to learn about a subject like rocketry from someone who has actually built a rocket and sent it into space than from a dusty old textbook that has never left a classroom shelf.

Another creative use of videoconferencing technology is applying it multi-school projects, or learning projects that involve more than one school. In this application, schools from districts, schools from different locations around the country, even schools from various places around the world can exchange all sorts of valuable information.

In addition, students can work on projects about other countries by meeting children from other countries in a virtual setting. Students can hold contests to help improve learning skills like spelling bees, history competitions, or geography bees to work with students at their level around the world. Moreover, student can hold miniature research conferences to discuss their findings on school projects, much the way that scientists in the real world hold research conferences.

One final creative application of videoconferencing is the way it could allow people to network professional activities, even if they are worlds away. For example, a teacher candidate, that is teachers who have not yet gotten their degrees, can videoconference with actual teachers and view actual classroom situations to decide how to deal with things in their own classrooms at a future date. This could open the way to mentoring relationships in the future. In truth, though, this could be applied to any future professionals in any field or industry. All of the tasks can be completed via a video screen, cutting down on travel time and expenses and giving people access to each other where access was never before possible.

There are many creative uses for videoconferencing. Having the equipment to start a good video conferencing session is a good way to start making your own creative uses for videoconferencing.