This is the part of GC where students need to take initiative over their own learning. Most likely (depending on how many students you have), it will be impossible to oversee each one's research process, so it is crucial that you provide them with the tools they need to do a thorough and complete job.
The goal of researching for GC is to learn about the following -- general understanding of the students' countries historically, politically, etc., what sorts of policies their countries have already implemented targeting the topic or issue, and what sorts of stances their countries might take in the future to target the topic or issue.
Class #1
At some point, you will have to assign your students to their country delegations. It is up to you how you want to do this, but assuming they already have their country assignments at this point, ask students to start to understand their countries, not just look up facts about them. Besides the obvious things your students should know like population size and location, some prospective lines of research you could lead them down include:
• What have been some of the most important historical events in your country?
• What is the demographic makeup of your country?
• What sorts of social, racial, political, economic issues does your country face?
• How would your country define itself culturally?
• Examples of current events related to the topic in your country.
These are quite open-ended and difficult questions to answer without a lot of prior knowledge, but its worth encouraging students to at least think about them (and do more research on their own at home!).
Class #2-3
One of the most difficult researching tasks for students, but one of the most important for the GC conference, is finding policies, both domestic and international, that countries have already implemented related to the topic. This was when a lot of guidance is necessary to get students finding relevant information, from explaining the various ways to do a Google search and all the synonyms for "policy" to physically searching through web pages with students one-on-one, doing lots of CTRL + F searches within.
I ended up lowering the requirements for students -- instead of finding one example of a domestic policy and one example of an international policy, I told them they could find two domestic or two international, or even just one policy so long as they did plenty of thorough research on it. However, I do not think you can bypass this step because the whole goal of the conference is to use knowledge of past legislation and the issues it targets to form new and relevant international policy that is inline with your country's position.
Class #4
The reality is, you most likely won't have access to computers in your school every class you need them for, and this can be quite frustrating. That's why it's important to keep your lesson plans adaptable. One idea for a class that I wish I had thought of while doing GC is to hold a Q&A session once your students have gotten some of their preliminary research done. This will also factor into the moderated caucuses during the mock conference as described later on.
The idea here would be to get students sharing information about what they found about their countries, and not only have their classmates ask questions to each other, but start pointing out similar issues amongst their countries, themes in policy, etc. You as the "moderator" of the Q&A could help spark discussion by pointing out some of these similarities and get students thinking about where there may be some big gaps in their research.