## 1 Introduction  
COVID-19 has accelerated the shift to blended or fully online learning environments, enforcing educational institutions to embrace technology and offer their students an online or at least blended learning experience [1, 2]. A large amount of data became accessible through learning management systems (LMSs), but, as of yet, this has not been generally analysed in a proper manner nor used to improve the efficiency of teaching and learning [3]. Institutions usually do not consider such data to drive their strategy, nor are teachers required to use the data to improve their teaching practice [4, 5, 6]. In this respect, in this Special Issue, we would like to tackle new approaches in creating learning environments that should be smarter, more inclusive, and involve emerging technologies that will boost the digital skills of students and bring them a more personalised experience. In this Special Issue, we included in total 14 contributions from 56 authors from 25 institutions from 13 countries across Asia, Europe, and North America. An impressive 13,512 students and educators were included in these studies, consisting of over 700 different groups, classes, institutions, and/or contexts, thereby providing rich and diverse insights into how ICT is currently being used in various educational contexts. We arranged our Special Issue based upon six topics, namely artificial intelligence in learning [7, 8, 9], applied robotics in education [10], automated approaches to create smart and inclusive learning environments for blended and online learning [11], emerging technologies in education [2, 11, 12, 13, 14], learning analytics, and big data in learning environments [6], and learning strategies for smart learning environments [15, 16]. In terms of the methodologies used, beyond more common survey approaches [2, 13, 15], there were several innovative approaches, such as a pluralistic walk-through of learning analytics applications for practitioners [6], playing poker with robots [10], and log-data from interactive knowledge representations [12]. After we describe the three systematic literature reviews [9, 16, 17], we will briefly describe the main insights of these studies based upon these topics, after which we will provide some further recommendations for future research. _Three systematic reviews on ICT skills, learning with plants, and NLP and Chinese language_  
Several studies were so-called systematic literature reviews, including focussing on ICT skills as part of 21 st century education [16], learning with plants [17], and automatic Chinese Essay Evaluation [9] using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. Given the worldwide distribution of telecommunications devices and an apparently unstoppable drift toward integrating ICT throughout workplaces and everyday life, it seems indisputable that everyone needs to develop skills to happily and effectively use these affordances. But when should children first explore and begin to play in this area? Can young children be taught about using technologies in a way that paves a smooth path toward competence across the spectrum of 21 st century skills? [PERSON] and [PERSON]'s [16] research suggests that children can launch their development of these skills between the ages of 3 and 6 years provided that care is taken to adjust learning activities to recognise children's development in key areas: inductive reasoning, deductive reasoning, abductive reasoning, causal reasoning, scientific reasoning, executive functions and computational thinking, fine motor skills and language, self-regulation, and social skills. [PERSON] and [PERSON] do not fall into a trap of proclaiming that achievements in these areas are sufficient, however. They note that issues relating to emotional, social, and motivational development also are important, nudging new work to use a wide lens when examining ICT skills and how they can be fostered in early childhood.