Need help with PSE 8

Next year, I'll be teaching (and before that creating from scratch this summer) a high school class on digital imaging. 75% Lightroom (we have version 4 installed) and 25 % Photoshop. Here's the issue: while I have PS CC (yeah, I drink the Kool-Aid but at $29 a month (for now) and a plethora of other apps I can use, it's worth it) and LR5 at home -- and Elements 11 on my daughter's computer -- I don't have a Version 8, which is the one installed at the school.

I don't want to spend the whole summer at the school's computer lab and I don't want to ask my student to do something that's impossible to achieve on the old version of PSE.

There must be a huge table somewhere with the improvements of each version? I could work my way backwards from there... Finding a PSE version that is four years old could be difficult...

Probably the greatest difference that you will run into is (if I recall correctly) that PSE8 lacks layer masks and content-aware fill. Layer masks can be "simulated" in a way that is fairly effective, but it's not exactly the same thing. You might look for a copy of Scott Kelby's PSE8 book, which should be around somewhere used and fairly cheap (maybe even on Amazon). Here's one link that may be helpful. It includes a further link to Adobe's comparison site:

http://prodesigntools.​com …ween-version-compare.html

Impossible to address the the real problem of the school keeping up? What is their upgrade plan? Are they planning to only upgrade every 5 years?

Perhaps broker a deal between the school and Adobe for LR 5 and PSE11.