As a former vocational instructor for LAUSD, I ran up against similar problems - the class was scheduled, but no software was available... for a month we ran the class on Adobe's Photoshop & Illustrator Demos... when those expired, I tried teaching the GIMP as a replacement. But the students wanted to learn software that they would actually find in a job environment - so attendance plummeted... It doesn't really matter whether the GIMP is almost as good as PhotoShop or not - as long as it's not commonly used in the work environment, then it becomes difficult to convince students that skills learned on the GIMP are transferable to Photoshop...
The good thing about Photoshop, is that the interface doesn't change that much from version to version - So Photoshop 7 is still valid, it doesn't look or function that differently from the current version... (Side note* I still have a copy of PS 1.07 - Photoshop that fits on a Floppy! It is functionally and recognizably Photoshop - Over all the versions, Adobe's interface really hasn't changed that much)...
As for html, why not use Dreamweaver? It may be an older version, but you can still teach all the html basics with it, how to lay out a page, frames, tables and so on - If the students learn the basics of html, then presumably they can adapt to most any html editor... There are also free editors available - if you're running on Windows, I found that NoteTab has an excellent, easy to understand interface... The problem with this approach - at least with my own students, I found that very few were prepared to learn the actual markup language... You could teach them how to push a button to turn text bold - but if you tried to show them what the bold tag actually was, they just blanked out... Now that may be my own failing as an instructor - but I found that the ideal of teaching the principles, was often just not achievable in a classroom environment...
Flash is a problem: The interface changed quite a bit after version five (thanx to the Adobe lawsuit) also, as others have noted, Action script has evolved and changed as well... So I suppose it depends upon the intended goals of the class - if you don't intend on teaching any action script, then that's not a worry... The interface is still an issue, but if the purpose of the class is to teach basic animation techniques, then Flash 5 is a perfectly serviceable animation application...
One aspect to consider - which may not be true where the poster teaches, but I found in my own experiences, that often the primary goal of the class was not to actually instruct the students, but to maintain them in attendance (classes with low attendance get the Ax!) One class that I subbed for several times, runs primarily on Mac LCII machines and the software taught is: PageMaker 5, Quark 3.2, Freehand 3 and some ancient B&W drawing app that resembles MacPaint... And that's it - I don't know what useful skills the students may get from this class, but the instructor has all the assignments laid out for them: "Put a line here - click this button - enter this value" and so on... If the software was ever upgraded, then the instructor would have to upgrade all the assignment instructions - and apparently that's not going to happen...
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As a former vocational instructor for LAUSD, I ran up against similar problems - the class was scheduled, but no software was available... for a month we ran the class on Adobe's Photoshop & Illustrator Demos... when those expired, I tried teaching the GIMP as a replacement. But the students wanted to learn software that they would actually find in a job environment - so attendance plummeted... It doesn't really matter whether the GIMP is almost as good as PhotoShop or not - as long as it's not commonly used in the work environment, then it becomes difficult to convince students that skills learned on the GIMP are transferable to Photoshop...
The good thing about Photoshop, is that the interface doesn't change that much from version to version - So Photoshop 7 is still valid, it doesn't look or function that differently from the current version... (Side note* I still have a copy of PS 1.07 - Photoshop that fits on a Floppy! It is functionally and recognizably Photoshop - Over all the versions, Adobe's interface really hasn't changed that much)...
As for html, why not use Dreamweaver? It may be an older version, but you can still teach all the html basics with it, how to lay out a page, frames, tables and so on - If the students learn the basics of html, then presumably they can adapt to most any html editor... There are also free editors available - if you're running on Windows, I found that NoteTab has an excellent, easy to understand interface... The problem with this approach - at least with my own students, I found that very few were prepared to learn the actual markup language... You could teach them how to push a button to turn text bold - but if you tried to show them what the bold tag actually was, they just blanked out... Now that may be my own failing as an instructor - but I found that the ideal of teaching the principles, was often just not achievable in a classroom environment...
Flash is a problem: The interface changed quite a bit after version five (thanx to the Adobe lawsuit) also, as others have noted, Action script has evolved and changed as well... So I suppose it depends upon the intended goals of the class - if you don't intend on teaching any action script, then that's not a worry... The interface is still an issue, but if the purpose of the class is to teach basic animation techniques, then Flash 5 is a perfectly serviceable animation application...
One aspect to consider - which may not be true where the poster teaches, but I found in my own experiences, that often the primary goal of the class was not to actually instruct the students, but to maintain them in attendance (classes with low attendance get the Ax!) One class that I subbed for several times, runs primarily on Mac LCII machines and the software taught is: PageMaker 5, Quark 3.2, Freehand 3 and some ancient B&W drawing app that resembles MacPaint... And that's it - I don't know what useful skills the students may get from this class, but the instructor has all the assignments laid out for them: "Put a line here - click this button - enter this value" and so on... If the software was ever upgraded, then the instructor would have to upgrade all the assignment instructions - and apparently that's not going to happen...