The traditional goals of museums have experienced strong changes and its educational function is becoming more sginificative. In this sense, Virtual Museums and Exhibitions (VMEs) are web portals constructed with a museologic approach, and constitute a promising field, presenting particular educational values. Hipertext format and Interactivity facilitates the creation of user-adapted visits (this constituting a key point for the Attention to Diversity in the classrooms). Hipermedia solutions and the web 2.0 philosophy enforces the constructionist approach for education (and make the student the center of the didactic experience). However, VMEs still remain poorly used by teachers, mainly because of the lack of didactic resources in VMEs and the poor knowledge on this kind of digital resource between teachers. In this communication, the creation of the VME on genetics "Reading the book of life" is described, together with the strategies undertaken to develop its educational value. This MVE is available in Catalan and Spanish at http://oliba.uoc.edu/adn.´ In order to increase its interactivity, the VME has been constructed using Flash and the Joomla! Content Management Site. This platform facilitates the contents to be presented in several ways depending on the choices of the user, and the participation of the user in contents generation. Contents are structured in 8 virtual exhibition halls inter-related between themselves through folksonomic approaches. Each exhibiton hall deals with a main topic of genetics and is introduced through atractive tittles: Will I develop scales on my skin if I eat transgenic tomatoes? ; The Spell of Tsars; The Mysterious elf of Leewenhoek; The mark of Hiroshima horror; Lucy's long journey; The attack of the clones; If I study a lot, will I have smarter children? ; What does ATGGTATTCCACTATGGTC mean?. To increase its educational value, several actions were undertaken. The creation of a Multimedia section can help students to deal with information from diverse formats. A new gallery of activities for students, with several kind of activities (Laboratory Experiments, Didactic Units and Science Popularization texts, Visit Dossiers, Research Activities….) empower the MVE as an educational resource and facilitates its use for the teachers. Other sections, as ADNews and Interviews, are included in the Agora of the Museum, a virtual space created to promote the museum as a collaborative space of for the construction of knowledge. A diffusion campaign to educational websites for teachers was performed, and as a result, at the present moment more than 30 educative portals, professional colleges, teachers' social bookmarkings, institutional pages and Science Popularization weblogs offer links to the exhibition. In two years, the virtual exhibition has received 380.000 visitors. The creation of educative resources and the diffusion campaign between educational sites has resulted in an increase of the rate of visitors. The virtual exhibition seems to be useful for teachers, as we have detected many accesses from links situated in several Edublogs , Moodle platforms and teacher's forums (where it receives very positive comments). From our results, to develop school-friendly elements is a good strategy to improve the educational use of an VME.

1. TOWARDS THE EDUCATIONAL USE OF VIRTUAL MUSEUMS Jordi Domènech Casal, PhD Teacher and ICT Coordinator at the Secondary School INS Marta Mata, Barcelona Research collaborator at the UOC Virtual Museology Group and the UAB Science Didactics Department Teacher trainer on ICTs at the Center of Ressources for Teachers (CRP) from Vallès Oriental

2. Vigotsky, Piaget, Bruner Living a change in the educational paradigm: from I teach to You learn Competences education

3. IBSE WebQuest Living a change in the educational paradigm: from I teach to You learn TAF … internet ressources? Moodle EduBlogs PDIs

4. Which are the needs we teachers have regarding internet resources? Not all ICTs are LKTs A “guaranted” quality and scientific value of the materials A popularization approach A will to deal with a topic in a complete, exhaustive perspective A multimedial integrative approach to the topic … as traditional Museums offers Not all TICs are TACs

5. The “New Museology” paradigm habitate internet “… a forum, a dialogue between curators and the public, or a public access system where visitors can assemble their own experiences” (Stamp, 1993) Virtual Museums and Exhibitions (VMEs)

6. Some examples of VMEs Voyage of the St. Louis http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/stlouis// Museum of Genetics Second Life

7. GoogleArt http://www.googleartproject.com/ Some examples of VMEs

8. Hypertext Why VMEs can be an answer to our new needs? Interactivity Acrony and atopy ICT intuition Hypermedia “ Competential” and significative learning Web 2.0 and constructivist approach Digital Citizenship

10. http: // oliba.uoc.edu / adn Let’s do it: Reading the book of life

11. A divulgative approach and interactive aestetichs Interactive menu dynamic presentation sensationalist tittles

12. A divulgative approach and interactive aestetichs Will I develop scales on my skin if I eat transgenic tomatoes? The Spell of Tsars The Mysterious elf of Leewenhoek The mark of Hiroshima horror Lucy's long journey The attack of the clones If I study a lot, will I have smarter children? What does ATGGTATTCCACTATGGTC mean?

13. A multimedia, hypertext scaffold #metatags Related pannels or Multimedia materials Other pannels of the same Hall Recent Research Articles on this field

16. From visitors to users, a challenge for “Reading the book of life” “… a forum, a dialogue between curators and the public, or a public access system where visitors can assemble their own experiences”

17. Diffusion campaign 6 Science popularization blogs 6 Institutional Educative portals 6 Blogs from teachers to teachers on educative ressources 21 Moodle and Edublogs from Secondary Schools and Universities 15 Common internet ressources (wikipedia…) 9 Social Bookmarking from teachers’ profile Awstats, Webalizer 1 International award

18. Linked to wikipedia Translated to catalan Diffusion campaign Visitors? Awstats, Webalizer Educational search terms Questions of the activities “consulted”

19. Conclusions and perspectives Constructivist VMEs: If users are not coming, go for them Teachers use VMEs if there is an adequate didactic scaffold to it (multidisciplinar VMEs?) A database/main portal of VMEs is needed to increase the didactic projection of VMEs Constructivist VMEs: certified profiles, social-professional projection