As Castonia said, there are a couple of small lessons about photo manipulation, retouching and just getting used to the software, but it's mostly only on the first term. The vast majority of the lessons are pretty much just drawing, so what you use shouldn't be much of an issue as long as you can draw comfortably on it.
You can check the Artschool section of the forums here to see and get an idea of what the exercises can look like