I skyped with my sister Amanda who lives in New York. It was pretty straightforward to do but our Internet is pretty unreliable so we couldn't chat very long. I think the technology could be very useful in the classroom especially for an expert talking to the students. Say you wanted to have a university professor of physics talk to the students but the only ones you knew were 2000 miles away at BYU, so you could skype and they could show some of their equipment or even some of the research experiments in progress without the safety hazards and travel expenses. I would definitely do this as my only contacts with physics professors right now are at BYU and I plan to teach in Pennsylvania. I also have a brother-in-law who is physics PhD and a hurricane expert for NASA and he works in Maryland. It would be possible but not easy for him to visit a class so I could skype with him and he could talk about some of the actual applications of physics today.