Should We Trust “Teacher-Approved” EdTech Apps?

And which criteria matter when teachers review EdTech products?

“Teacher-approved” is becoming a powerful trust signal in educational technology. For parents, educators, and schools, it suggests that a product has been independently reviewed by teachers and found to be educationally valuable. But what does “teacher-approved” actually mean?

A recent article by Zommer and Kerssens (2026) examines Google’s Teacher Approved programme and raises important questions about how educational legitimacy is created with educational apps. The researchers report that Google launched the programme in 2020 to help parents identify high-quality apps for children under 13. Today, many of the featured apps have been downloaded tens or even hundreds of millions of times. The programme states that “teachers and specialists” review apps, yet it remains unclear who these reviewers are, how many are teachers, how they are selected, whether they are independent, or how disagreements and negative evaluations are handled.

Perhaps more surprisingly, Google’s own developer guidance states that an app does not have to be educational to qualify. Instead, it may simply be “enriching” or support a child’s “healthy development.” At the same time, Google also claims reviewers assess apps for their “learning impact,” without explaining how learning is defined or measured, particularly for entertainment-focused products.

In a saturated market with no clear guardrails on quality, approval badges carry persuasive power. The researchers found that several “Teacher Approved” apps were categorised by their own developers as entertainment or action games rather than educational products. The badge therefore risks communicating educational value where none has been independently demonstrated.

Transparency in teacher-reviewed apps

Teachers bring invaluable expertise about learning, pedagogy, and children’s needs. Their time and professional judgement deserve to be recognised and fairly compensated. So they should be paid for their reviews. But whether they are paid or not, the process of reviewing should be a transparent, independent, and accountable evaluation process. The evaluation criteria, reviewer selection, governance, and reporting of the review process need to be open to scrutiny.

As the EdTech sector continues to expand, quality labels will become increasingly influential. Their credibility depends on the integrity of the process behind it.

So the next time you see a product labelled “Teacher Recommended” ask:

• Who selected the teachers or reviewers?

• Which evaluation framework was used?

• Were the criteria published in advance?

• How were disagreements and negative reviews handled?

• Who funded and governed the review process?

These questions matter across all forms of evidence, not only when teachers or parents provide reviews, but also when researchers and expert evaluators assess EdTech products. The underlying issue is the same: what principles and safeguards should govern evaluation if we want to build trust in the EdTech evidence ecosystem?

Teachers’ reviews, too, should be based on transparent selection of reviewers, predefined and publicly available criteria, clear procedures for handling disagreement and negative findings, and disclosure of who funded and governed the review process.

Across our projects in several countries, we have worked with teachers from diverse rural and urban school contexts and across a wide range of EdTech products and services. Through this work, we have developed and refined a systematic set of criteria that teachers can use to assess the pedagogical effectiveness of an EdTech tool. The rubric is designed to be comprehensive enough to capture multiple dimensions of effectiveness, while remaining sensitive to the specific subject area, teachers’ needs, and learners’ needs. The rubric is currently under peer review for publication in an academic journal, but we are happy to share the current version, together with guidance on how to apply it, with anyone who contacts us by email (info@foreduimpact.org).

We have most recently been refining the rubric with teachers in Norway, Kenya, and Nigeria, and it is now used extensively by our teacher reviewers when organisations approach us for app and product evaluations. For organisations seeking a systematic assessment of their product, grounded in a transparent rubric and informed by a diverse global network of teachers, please contact us. We currently have three places available for pro bono teacher reviews this summer!