The COVID-19 pandemic forced the world into unknown territories of closed schools and remote teaching, and gave teachers a range of new experiences with physics teaching. We studied these experiences by using survey responses from 85 upper secondary physics teachers in Norway. We found that home-school physics instruction was characterised by a considerably lower occurrence of oral activity, collaboration and practical work than instruction in a normal situation. This suggests that students had difficult conditions for learning physics concepts and training key scientific practices, and may consequently be at a disadvantage in higher education. However, many teachers described valuable experiences that they would bring with them into their regular teaching, including home experiments and oral assessments. Such innovations can potentially enrich physics education, given that teachers are supported with tailored learning and assessment resources, and arenas for sharing new approaches within the physics teaching community.