Heritage at your Touch

Take your students on a virtual tour at a real colonial house and meet the people who lived there and examine their things!

Meet George at McCrae Homestead

Meet Nellie at La Trobe’s Cottage

Heritage At Your Touch invites students to use their classroom web browser to explore two early colonial sites, the McCrae Homestead (1845) and Governor La Trobe’s Cottage (1843). Teachers are encouraged to contact us about visiting the sites as an extension to the virtual experience.

For Victorian curriculum links, please see the table on the McCrae Education Program website. This virtual experience is also suitable for interstate schools and is aligned with themes of citizenship, contact history, early colonial Australia and materials design.

This site does not work well on some devices and browsers. Please use Chrome as your web browser on a laptop or desktop machine.

Teacher and Student Resource Kits

Download these kits for use in your classroom.

Download the McCrae Homestead Teachers kit

Download the La Trobes Cottage Student Resource Kit

Heritage at Your Touch has been produced with composite classes in mind.

The program offers:

a game environment using real spaces, video characters and artefacts
over 150 PDF files containing information and images and questions about the families and their things
meet 6 real characters like Governor La Trobe and George Gordon McCrae
a full education kit with inquiry questions

It was developed with the support of the Telematics Trust in partnership with the History Teachers Association of Australia (Victoria).Students can work individually or in groups, but we encourage teachers to complete aspects of their source as a whole class activity. This provides opportunity for students to pool their knowledge of the past and engage in deep, deductive thinking.

Curriculum
The Heritage at Your Touch Project (La Trobe’s Cottage) is specifically designed for level 5 students as it draws on a range of rich primary sources relating to the growth of the Victorian colonies during the nineteenth century. It can also be used by students in level 4 to support their understanding of the early contact between Europeans and Indigenous people.

It is equally well suited to helping students in level 6 research the movements, events and ideas that led to the Federation of Australia in 1901.